


My Body Is a Cage

by Alias (anafabula)



Series: the one where Martin puts his crush in a jar and pokes holes in the lid [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Banned Together Bingo 2020, Complicated Relationships, Emotional Hurt, Established Relationship, Isolation, Lonely Avatar Martin Blackwood, M/M, Monster Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Mutual Pining, Past Georgie Barker/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Solitary Confinement, although Beholding algolagnia makes everything a bit more complicated, any relationship with a Lonely avatar is just. "Established Relationship - Mutual Pining" honestly, canon-typical lonely, does this even count as using body temperature as metaphor at this point, he'll be fine! probably. for Jon values of 'fine'., last one was too nice time for no comfort, sad monster right now though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-15 00:20:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28929435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: Jon’s hands always ran cold. Even in the real world, before. Let alone now.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: the one where Martin puts his crush in a jar and pokes holes in the lid [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1567801
Comments: 2
Kudos: 31





	My Body Is a Cage

**Author's Note:**

> I made "`Gays Holding Hands`" sad. Why did I make that sad.
> 
> (The reasons it is sad will not make sense without the rest of the series, FYI.)

Jon’s hands had always run cold, before. Not enough to be a real medical issue – not enough for him to notice it as a real medical issue, anyway – but enough to be characteristic; not enough for him to notice, but enough for people to tell him not to touch them. It’s the sort of thing he can remember Georgie saying, clearly, in her voice even as the ability to remember voices through a means other than cassette tape ebbs from him on average. With the undertone that he should’ve known better than to touch her without warning, which always felt like telling him that he should know better than to touch her at all. Even when he knew that wasn’t the point, that she’d never actually say that, he still – it’s not like he was going to grow new hands than the ones she objected to. So it felt like it was about him, still.

Martin doesn’t mind. Martin barely notices, Jon thinks, save for the very first time – before he’d known what to expect – and for the way that he now seems to find it bracing. His hands fit very nicely on Jon’s, around them, pleasantly textured and singularly warm. If Jon were better at thinking whilst holding his hands still he’d barely ever let go of him. As is there’s a significant tradeoff to be had, in practice.

He’s _so_ cold, today, though. The poor circulation on the one hand and the chill of the air on the other, the still air of the Archives almost indistinguishable from a walk-in freezer. Jon’s not cold enough to shiver, because he never is, and he’s not numb – he doesn’t get numb any more, the way he used to, not with the occasional excursion, not with actually more or less taking care of himself, and that’s nice enough, not dropping things and not having it affect his handwriting and such. Not cold and numbness as an outside incursion and internal reaction, then, but chill as a state of being, something sapped from him that he can’t regenerate alone.

It’s taken some effort to try to stop tracking Martin’s visits, and Jon thinks he’s doing all right at it. If it’s been a while, as tracked in terms of how hard it is to remember what Martin’s skin would feel like on his own – how difficult it is to imagine warmth as opposed to imagining, and then experiencing, the longing for it – then that’s as much an indicator of his own mood as it is of the passage of time.

He could probably draw his own fingerprints from memory, if someone made him, Jon thinks idly, rubbing his hands against each other. Odd thought. They’d even be half decent at identifying him through means other than human bias, what with the scarring, the way a decent percentage of the surface of his hands is just smooth, striated evidence of past injury. But there’s no one who would ask, for a great multitude of reasons, and no one who would be looking for him in such a way as to want to know.

No one looking for him at all, generally. Except Martin.

Or maybe not even Martin – it’s not like Jon knows how this works from his side (and he tries, he does try, not to Know about it all, for both their sakes) but it’s not like he ever seems… unsure, in a way that Jon would recognize as such. Not like he ever seems to wonder where to find him, as opposed to knowing. Maybe Jon’s a bright spot of certainty in his awareness, then, something more relevant to him – that he actually cares about – mapped on the same surfaces as he presumably tracks victims. Or whatever it is he does. Jon doesn’t _know_ , he can’t know, and insofar as the lists of things he _wants_ to know are concerned, it’s a relatively low priority with a disproportionately high likely price.

Maybe he’ll ask, someday. Or even Ask – _make_ Martin tell him about how being his sort of creature works, when Jon can convince him that that’s what he wants to know. Not loopholes or vulnerabilities or some kind of catch outside the way Martin’s already caught him, just genuinely wanting to know what his life is like. Jon kind of wishes it was easier to convince Martin that that was what he wanted to know in the first place, but… he supposes he did somewhat deserve this one, still. If he’s asking Martin to trust him it’s not like he’s got all that staggering a track record in terms of proving he doesn’t have ulterior motives mixed up in the knowing.

In the meantime, he examines his own experiences with no small amount of curiosity. Is he unhappy? If he is, then it’s either a transient thing – unhappiness as the knowledge of something suboptimal to be resolved, or else of something irreconcilable and thus hardly worth his dwelling on – or it’s a state of being, and either way it doesn’t bear much independent examination. He feels something, certainly, wrapping up inside his ribcage, a kind of bristling structural trust between his bones, coiled around his spine. Something that reminds him who and what and where he is. It doesn’t feel like pain, though, it barely feels like cold – the absence. It’s just the absence.

He does know Martin misses him. Terribly, apparently – it’s not surprising, even if it might be a little flattering despite it all. It bleeds into the air like the egregious and self-assured warmth of his body when he holds Jon as he reads, or when they talk; it’s as much a component of him as Jon’s impulses toward inquiry are for himself, and there’s a little sense of bright almost-pride, even if it’s a sense entirely devoid of warmth, to know he’s that important.

(Even if the thing that makes him _important_ is the fact that he made the man he loves a monster? Well. That’s not fair, though, is it, Jon thinks. He was almost entirely absent from those proceedings. The fact that he’s Martin’s anchor _now_ notwithstanding – the fact of what that means to him more a question of what, exactly, something like Martin could ever be anchored to.)

Jon’s fingertips might be the coldest part of him, at this point, just because he can’t stand to have his hands held down for long. Even with the many incentives entailed by the question of Martin, the sense of warmth and wholeness and existence, even the trivial extent to which Jon does quite like his skin.

He still just can’t stomach holding still, not really, not in a way that would impact him for long. He touches Martin, and Martin touches him, and especially when they leave and he can coax Martin into visibility it’s easy to insinuate his fingers between Martin’s and leave it at that. But for the most part – certainly too much for it to make a lasting difference, if such things could even happen – it’s beyond him; Jon reaches out, eagerly if not with outright desperation, whenever given the opportunity, and then he pulls away.

And all acceptance aside, he can’t quite not resent the fact, when it comes around to his being left alone. That sometimes – most of the time, by definition – Martin just won’t _be_ there, if and when Jon manages to quiet down and change his mind. That the kinetic lulls in his own ability to occupy space are more likely than not to coincide with no company whatsoever, and Jon, alone, can do nothing to change this, when they do. He’ll just be on the downswing of stillness for no reason, with no benefit, and not shiver, and know himself to be no warmer than the still and processed air.

Martin is due for a visit about now, though. Jon thinks. He’s almost sure. He’s looking forward to it.

It’s not like he can do anything else, after all.


End file.
